Two years after opening its doors as an innovative co-working habitat, NextSpace is making a small but crucial shift from provider of workspace and wi-fi for freelancers to talent scout and mentor for budding entrepreneurs. As part of a new partnership with Menlo Park-based firm Wavepoint Ventures—its first tango with venture capital— NextSpace will identify and coach four to six entrepreneurial concerns each year from the Monterey Bay area. A small but as-yet-undetermined number of those will be selected by Wavepoint for funding, wildest-dreams-come-true-making, etc.
Two years after opening its doors as an innovative co-working habitat, NextSpace is making a small but crucial shift from provider of workspace and wi-fi for freelancers to talent scout and mentor for budding entrepreneurs. As part of a new partnership with Menlo Park-based firm Wavepoint Ventures—its first tango with venture capital— NextSpace will identify and coach four to six entrepreneurial concerns each year from the Monterey Bay area. A small but as-yet-undetermined number of those will be selected by Wavepoint for funding, wildest-dreams-come-true-making, etc.
NextSpace CEO Jeremy Neuner says his company (specifically he and the three other board members tasked with the mentoring project) is ideally suited to be Wavepoint’s eyes and ears in the Santa Cruz-Monterey region. “We know what a lot of the entrepreneurial landscape in town looks like,” he says. “We have a lot of relationships at UCSC, we have a good relationship with the Marina Technology Cluster. We’ll be leveraging a lot of those relationships.”
Wavepoint has historically focused on software, clean tech and medical device start-ups, and in fact the first Santa Cruz group to be seriously considered for mentoring is a financial sector software concern whose members are often found within the NextSpace hive. (It’s not final, so Neuner isn’t naming names.) That said, Neuner says he doesn’t see NextSpacers being the majority of those chosen for mentoring. “Most of our members, the vast majority, are not the kind of businesses a venture capital firm would target. We have a lot of independent freelancers, one- and two-person operations not on that high-growth potential track VC is looking for,” he says.
Still, a bumper crop of entrepreneurs in the area is probably going to mean more work for the graphic designers and marketing mavens buzzing around NextSpace—not a bad thing for the local economy.
While the NextSpace mentoring team is rasping out “You got what it takes, kid” to select local startups in the Monterey Bay area, the Sonoma Mountain Business Cluster in Rohnert Park will be doing the same in the North Bay while a Wavepoint partner works the Sacramento area. So hyperlocal has come to the world of venture capital. Says Wavepoint partner Peter Gardner, “Other people are certainly investing in smaller communities, but we’re not aware of anyone who’s applied this local mentoring approach and in particular is working with a local partner. That’s particularly important. We want to be working not only with NextSpace but with the university and the business service community to strengthen the entrepreneurial ecosystem.”
It’s all for the greater good, he says. “In general, we think the more you support entrepreneurship in a community, the more opportunities there are for everybody.”
